I have an old Pi hanging around doing nothing. When I originally got it it had the latest Pi OS with desktop loaded and ran like garbage, not surprisingly. So I messed with it headless for a bit, then found RISCOS as an option in Pi imager utility and that is just a neat OS. Fun to play around with for sure. But now I’m wondering what else I could use the old thing for. I see folks run Pihole on it, but I’ve already got 2 instances of Adguard Home running.
Could this handle Syncthing? Or would the data transfer be so bad it’s not worth it? Wouldn’t mind having an off-site backup device at my parents house if it would work.
Anyone else got one in their homelab?
You must log in or register to comment.
It might be too outdated to do major services, but it’s still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.
You could build a weather station, monitor temperature and humidity in your attic and crawlspace, automatically water plants, etc. You don’t need much electronics knowledge for that sort of thing.
I had a really important role of my Pi 1 B+ for a long time; it was a network storage for my PlayStation 2 to play ISOs from the network with Free McBoot and Open PS2 Loader.
grabbed a big HDD, and old CD drive case and put everything inside. The Pi could be powered from the PS2s USB, hooked up a short network cable and it was ready to go.
Tho I still have that PS2, it’s not in use anymore, so neither the Pi.
nice, it wasn’t where you could do that with the PlayStation 2
This would be perfect for a BBS.
Interesting. I guess this is one of those technologies I knew about but didn’t have a name for it! I will look into this .
Mine is my DNS. Pi-hole with unbound.
Hmmm unbound does work with AGH too… Might have to look at trying this
The original Pi B had a single core 700mhz ARMv6 processor and 512mb of memory. It’s fine for embedded projects using GPIO or a mini LCD screen, but that’s about it. You’d be lucky to even decode 720p video on it as a streaming box.
It might work neat as a monitoring device to keep tabs on the rest of your homelab machines and display a status output or something.
No, the original Pi B can play 1080p video just fine. The video is not decoded by the CPU. H264 and older codecs play just fine. It cannot handle h265 videos as it doesn’t have a hardware decoder for those. Kodi works just fine in fact. The interface is a little bit slow, but actual video playback is fine.
I did overclock it a bit. I think it’s at 900mhz now, reliably. Probably not enough in the grand scheme of things. But hey, it’s something!
Mine is still going strong and runs my irrigation system with the gpio interfacing with a relay board.
ADS-B receiver that uploads to ADSBExchange, Flightaware, and FlightRadar24. Start tracking the skys
I was wishing I had one just recently. I’m not smart enough to get my ancient APC UPS to interface to Debian with the USB cable, so I need a device I can ping that’s plugged into the mains (ie not through the UPC) so I can run a script that shuts the server down when the Pi stops responding to the pings.
So that’s all it’d need to do - respond to pings when it’s powered on. I’ve ordered a B+ for exactly this job.
Have you tried using NUT? https://networkupstools.org/
No. That looks very promising. Thanks, I’ll check it out!
Probably cheaper to just use an ESP8266 or the like
ESP8266
Thanks - I sort of had that Idea and looked at the ESP32 with an Ethernet port, but it was looking complex to flash because of no UART etc. Looks like the ESP8266 would need an add on for Ethernet? Plus I might still be out of my depth figuring out how to flash it?
I also considered an Ethernet hat for the Uno since I have a couple of them floating around somewhere, but in the end the B+ was cheaper. Those little boards would probably be better for power consumption as well though
That’s a clever idea. My UPS does already have the smart pants features like that, but I love the simplicity of that as a concept.
I was using it for Pi-hole all the way up until I got a 4b and then put Pi-hole in a docker. Solid dude, will be hanging on my wall like those disassembled iPhones
I don’t see why it wouldn’t handle SyncThing, as long as you’re not syncing a lot of clients.
You could also get a cheap screen and use it for a news/weather/social feed.
i/o is shit on that thing. Syncing any reasonable amount of data is out of question.
I think the Pi 4 was the first Pi with gigabit ethernet. All the Pi’s before that were limited to 100Mbit. For that reason, syncthing is probably a bad idea since it will be very slow in terms of syncing speed
Eh, maybe. Depends on how much they’re backup up and how often. They said the backups are off-site, so unless BOTH locations have a very fast connection, I’d bet that 100Mbit networking wouldn’t be the huge bottleneck that you’re thinking.
I was thinking about hooking one up to a GPS module to run a local NTP server
https://blog.networkprofile.org/gps-backed-local-ntp-server/
I know you have an adguard, but have you thought about ditching those and using pinhole+unbound?
I used Pihole for years, but have found AGH an overall better UI from a management perspective. And a quick searchs shows that unbound can work with AGH as well so I may give that a try.
I use mine as kitchen radio with https://moodeaudio.org/
Realistically the best bang-for-the-buck is maybe to sell it to some collector and get a new one ;-)
Mostly tongue-in-cheek, though. I don’t know if anyone is actually willing to pay for it, but I know some people are quite happy when they find their old Pi 1.
Yeah, I have a pi 3 and 4 in the “fleet” already. Was mostly just looking some something to use it for aside from wall decor.
